I'm a couch potato. There, I've said it. I love sitting down and watching sci-fi movies, like any good geek would. And this is an (almost religious) action that hasn't changed for many, many, years. But I feel that we're in for a surprise soon. The way we watch TV and access content is about to change. TV watching will at last arrive into the 21st Century, and the technology giants will be there to duke it out for the reins of this new industry.

Each TV manufacturer must include with every new TV model shipped this small (standard, upgradeable?) hardware piece that also has a network-upgradeable firmware. The software included must be compatible with all the other new TVs in the market. And it must run applications -- similar, if not exactly the same, to the ones you can find on your smartphone. The reason why all TVs must run the same platform is that if each manufacturer goes with their own incompatible implementation this will never take off.

This might be possible in China, but western capitalism tends to avoid stuff like that.

What CPU should it have? ARM? That would royally screw Intel, in potentially illegal fashion.

I don't believe time is even close to being ripe to standardize on any software/hardware platform. Let free competition hash out the winners. We have great competitive technology situation right now, let's not ruin it.

This is also why I think focusing on putting the device inside TV is a bad idea, it's much easier to get good competition and upgrade story with cheap set-top boxes. - without need to co-operate with TV manufacturers.

What *could* be useful standard would be something like ATX specification about how the computer should be housed inside the TV.

Personally, I think MeeGo will be a major player here, on the virtue of being quite vendor neutral.